HOME SCHOOLING: A CQ Researcher Report

Record: Marcia Clemmitt, “Home Schooling: Do Parents Give their Children A Good Education?” CQ Researcher 24, no. 10 (7 March 2014), pp. 217-240. [Available Here]

Summary:

The CQ Researcher has long been an influential publication, especially among politicians and others connected to the United States Congress.  Clemmitt is a veteran journalist who has provided in-depth analysis of several educational issues in the past.  She brings her wide experience and the publication’s resources together here on the topic of homeschooling.

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The 2013 NCES Homeschooling Data

Every four years the National Center for Education Statistics’ enormous National Household Education Survey includes questions about homeschooling.  The results of the latest round of homeschooling questions (from the 2011 survey) were released in August of 2013.  This massive survey (n=17,563) provides us with the best data by far on homeschooling, consisting as it does of a representative sample of the entire population of the United States.  You can read the preliminary results in tables 7 and 8 of the latest survey here.

Five years ago I summarized what previous rounds of the NCES survey had uncovered about homeschooling.  Here I will update that summary, incorporating the newer data.

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RESISTING THE STATUS QUO: Black Homeschoolers in Atlanta and Washington DC

Record: Cheryl Fields-Smith and Monica Wells Kisura, “Resisting the Status Quo: The Narratives of Black Homeschoolers in Metr-Atlanta and Metro-DC” in Peabody Journal of Education 88, no. 3 (2013): 265-283.

Summary:  Fields-Smith of the University of Georgia, whose pathbreaking work on Black homeschoolers has been reviewed before on this site, and Wells Kisura of Trinity Washington University here combine the results of their qualitative studies of black homeschoolers to make several important generalizations.

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A New Book that Surveys almost all Extant Homeschooling Research

This post reviews Joseph Murphy, Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2012).

Murphy, Associate Dean at Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt University and author of many, many books and articles on a wide range of topics, here provides a remarkable synthesis of nearly the entire corpus of homeschooling research published from the 1980s to the present.

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More Homeschool Coverage in Popular Outlets

Continuing the theme of last week’s post, here follows a round-up of more recent treatments of homeschooling in the mainstream press.

First, here is a human-interest piece from the New Yorker about homeschooled child actors.   

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The Full 2007 NCES Data!

A couple of months ago I noted with great excitement and not a little perplexity the release of new NCES data on homeschooling numbers.  Well, now NCES has released its 2009 “Condition of Education” report, and indicator 6 (pp. 14-15) gives us the full NCES data on homeschooling.  Read it here.  A few of the highlights: 

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Glass on Homeschooling and Privatization

This post reviews Gene V. Glass, Fertilizers, Pills, And Magnetic Strips: The Fate Of Public Education In America (Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2008).

Glass, a professor of education at Arizona State University and author of numerous studies related to empirical research in education, here provides a sweeping, almost epic account of the broad economic and social trends that have affected recent educational policy.  While homeschooling is not a central theme of his book, it is for him one facet of a larger trend toward educational privatization that he tries to account for here. 

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At Last! All State Homeschool Data in One Place!

Several months ago, just prior to the new NCES data that was released, I posted enrollment data from six states that suggested a levelling off of homeschool growth.

Then, only a few weeks later, NCES came out with data that suggested continued dramatic growth in homeschooling!

Now, finally, I’ve got all of the available state data in one place, accompanied by convenient graphs that make trends very easy to observe, followed by references for where it all came from.  The final product was too complicated to post in the normal manner, so my handy workstudy student Philip Martin helped me put it together into a PDF.

Here it is: Home School Data

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Breaking News! New NCES Homeschool Data!

Just in time for Christmas, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has finally released its latest figures on homeschooling – the gift at the top of any homeschool researcher’s list!  This is a big deal.  If you’ve read much homeschooling literature you’ve seen NCES’ 2003 data used over and over, because it’s the best we’ve got for estimating the national population of homeschoolers.  In 2003 NCES estimated that 1.1 million children were being homeschooled (2.2% of school-age children).  The new estimate for 2007 is 1.5 million (2.9%).  This is a 36% increase in four years. 

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